China to phase out harvesting organs from executed prisoners
Unethical practice of using prisoners' body parts for transplants to be phased out, official says
The mainland will cut down on the unethical harvesting of organs from executed prisoners early next year when a new organ donation system is set up, a government expert said yesterday.
Dr Wang Haibo , director of the Ministry of Health's China Organ Transplant Response System Centre, was quoted in the World Health Organisation's November journal as saying that the unethical and non-sustainable form of organ harvesting would gradually be abandoned.
"The implementation of the new national system [on organ donation and transplantation] will start early next year, at the latest," said Wang, also assistant director of the China Liver Transplant Registry at the University of Hong Kong's school of medicine.
"While we cannot deny the executed prisoner's right to donate organs, an organ transplantation system relying on death-row prisoners' organs is not ethical or sustainable.
"Now there is consensus among China's transplant community that the new system will relinquish the reliance on organs from executed convicts."
In an e-mail reply to the South China Morning Post yesterday, Wang said the new national system "represented a new organ source and could mark the initiation of the phase out".